Vance Packard Quotes

• New pressures are causing ever more people to find their main satisfaction in their consumptive role rather than in their productive role. And these pressures are bringing forward such traits as pleasure-mindedness, self-indulgence, materialism, and passivity as conspicuous elements of the American character.

  Vance Packard

  Character, Self, People

  34 Copy quote

• Leadership appears to be the art of getting others
  to want to do something you are convinced should be done

  Vance Packard

  Leadership, Art, Done

  55 Copy quote

• As businessmen caught a glimpse of the potentialities inherent in endlessly expanding the wants of people under consumerism, forced draft or otherwise, many began to see blue skies... What was needed was strategies that would make Americans in large numbers into voracious, wasteful, compulsive consumers-and strategies that would provide products assuring such wastefulness. Even where wastefulness was not involved, additional strategies were needed that would induce the public to consume at ever-higher levels.

  Vance Packard

  Blue, Sky, Numbers

  22 Copy quote

• The most common characteristic of all police states is intimidation by surveillance. Citizens know they are being watched and overheard. Their mail is being examined. Their homes can be invaded.

  Vance Packard

  Home, Police, Citizens

  Anne Edwards, David G. McCullough, Vance Oakley Packard, Andrew Sinclair, Daphne Du Maurier (1978). “Vivien Leigh: a biography”

  28 Copy quote

• At one of the largest advertising agencies in America psychologists on the staff are probing sample humans in an attempt to find how to identify, and beam messages to, people of high anxiety, body consciousness, hostility, passiveness, and so on.

  Vance Packard

  America, Agency, People

  Vance Packard (1991). “The Hidden Persuaders”

  16 Copy quote

• In the field of marketing . . . the trend toward selling [has] reached something of a nadir with the unveiling . . . of so-called subliminal projection. That is the technique designed to flash messages past our conscious guard.

  Vance Packard

  Past, Marketing, Technique

  16 Copy quote

• The difference between a top-flight creative man and the hack is his ability to express powerful meanings indirectly.

  Vance Packard

  Powerful, Creativity, Men

  Vance Packard (1991). “The Hidden Persuaders”

  8 Copy quote

• If the person you are trying to diagnose politically is some sort of intellectual, the chances are two to one he is a Democrat.

  Vance Packard

  Two, Political, Intellectual

  11 Copy quote

• Furthermore, unlike Man's other great good friend the horse, the cat is no sweating serf of Man. The only labor she condescends to perform is to catch mice and rats, and that's fun.

  Vance Packard

  Horse, Fun, Cat

  11 Copy quote

• Rock 'n Roll is monotony tinged with hysteria.

  Vance Packard

  Music, Rocks, Hysteria

  7 Copy quote

• You can't tell a millionaire's son from a billionaire's.

  Vance Packard

  Son, Wealth, Funny Money

  9 Copy quote

• The Christian notion of the possibility of redemption is incomprehensible to the computer.

  Vance Packard

  Christian, Redemption, Computer

  9 Copy quote

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